“Nettie, mon agneau chéri. Qu’est-ce tu dessines?” His lamb had left behind the toddler’s solid physique for the more coltish dimensions of girlhood. When had that happened?
“She is drawing battles, of course,” Tante Lucille said, motioning Rye into the parlor. “You bring the cold and damp with you, and why did not that useless Marie hang up your coat?”
“Marie took a little package for me to the kitchen.” A sizable package bearing tea, spices, honey, white flour, a half wheel of cheese, and a few other comestibles. “Show me your great battle, Nettie.”
She scrambled out of his embrace. “Devez-vous parler anglaise, Colonel?”
“We must both speak English, child, until you can think as easily in one language as the other.” Though it was never quite that simple. Rye dreamed in French, the language of his mother’s lullabies, while English was the natural choice for cursing.
“I am drawing the great Bonaparte,” Nettie said, retrieving a square of paper from the table by the window. “He was victorious everywhere save Waterloo, and then he was defeated by the treacherous mud.”
The great Bonaparte had erred beyond redemption by trying to best a Russian winter, and he’d made tactical blunders approaching his final battle too—thank the heavenly hosts. Rye shrugged out of his coat and hung it on the back of a chair facing the hearth. The fire was giving off adequate heat, but no more than adequate.
“You have drawn the emperor on a fine steed,” Rye said, bending to kiss Tante Lucille’s smooth cheek and taking a seat at the table. “He looks quite handsome.” Nettie had drawn Bonaparte brandishing his sword. In battle, the man had been brave to a fault.
“Madame Martin comes by,” Tante Lucille said. “She shows Nettie a few little things to improve her drawing.”
Thus did the émigré community sustain itself. Madame, whose late husband had once owned thousands of acres, would not take money for instructing Nettie, but she would enjoy a cup of tea and some sandwiches during the lesson, and Lucille would press the leftovers on Madame when she left, lest they go stale.
Lucille, despite her advanced years, watched other people’s children most days. The fiction that the children gathered in Lucille’s parlor merely to play preserved parents from parting with coin. More than once, Rye had stopped by of an evening and found Lucille reading to a half-dozen children whose mothers were apparently employed in evening work.
If there was any justice, Bonaparte would have been made to apologize to his countrymen and countrywomen for what his ambitions had cost them.
“Nettie,” Rye said, “might you see if Marie can use assistance in the kitchen? I did bring a few little treats with me, and they will need to be put away.”
Nettie was out the door in the next instant, Bonaparte clearly forgotten.
“You spoil her,” Lucille said. “Little girls should be spoiled from time to time. Little boys too. We heard you took some business from Fournier. Well done.”
Rye had come here specifically to catch up on the gossip, but Lucille’s blunt change of subject rankled. “How did you hear that?”
“Fournier grumbled, naturellement, and because he grumbled to his valet, his clerks, his mistress, his groom, and his dog, one could not help but hear. Our champagne is far superior to the pig swill he peddles, and he knows it.”
Fournier served a decent, irreproachable champagne. His fault lay in what he charged for his product. “Dorning has allowed me a foot in the door at The Coventry Club, and Fournier will respect the family connection, but somebody has taken it into his head to breathe new life into the old rumors about me.”
Lucille twitched at her shawl—only the one today, an exquisite creation of crocheted wool. The colors were an autumnal blend of gold, copper, olive, and slate blue and the weave loose. In her youth, Lucille wouldn’t have been caught even at home in such a pedestrian garment, but for the next six months, she would likely wear it daily.
“Fournier is a businessman,” Lucille said. “He would not dredge up military gossip to use against you. He would malign your grapes, your bottles, your prices, but not you.”
“How do you know the gossip is military, Tante?”
Her dark brown eyes went to the scene beyond the window, a modest street of shops that might have been busier, but for the inclement weather. Few trees would sport many leaves after today’s foul weather, and the sun would reach more of the pavement, when the sun deigned to appear at all.
“With you,” she said, “the worst gossip is military. They cannot forget, these English, and they do not forgive. They want French lady’s maids and French chefs. French valets, French tutors, and French fencing masters. They neglect to recall that we French have ears and long memories of our own.”
“What have you heard?”
She waved a delicate hand sporting a fingerless, crocheted glove. “You were a bumbler as an officer. You made foolish decisions. Your men suffered needlessly.”
Mere grumbling. Persistent grumbling. Like every officer, Rye had made mistakes. Understandable, well-intentioned mistakes. Blunders even, or he’d followed stupid orders.
“Nothing more than that?”
Tante was spared a reply by Marie arriving with the tea tray, Nettie gamboling at her side. The maid set the tray down carefully, curtsied and left, while Nettie eyed the tea cakes. The service was Sèvres, and Lucille had famously secreted it in the trunks of her negligees and stockings when she’d fled to London. She’d been smart enough to bring fancy snuffboxes, vanity sets, and jewels as well, and her foresight had saved lives.
Her wealth had long since been dissipated when Rye had found her dwelling among London’s émigrés. Lucille had allowed Rye to compensate her for Nettie’s upbringing—and house her and a half dozen of her aging friends—in exchange for that assistance.
He sipped a cup of tea to be polite and ate a small slice of the tarte aux pommes he’d brought from Tante’s preferred French bakery.
“The tart wants something,” he said, dusting his hands over his plate. “It’s good, but too well behaved.”
“Calvados,” Tante replied, sipping her tea. “In the cream, in the filling. A touch only. Monsieur Roberts would not waste his stores of good brandy on everyday preparations, but still, the tart is good.”
The tart was French, and that sufficed for Lucille, despite its prosaic flavor.
“The tart is very good,” Nettie declared. “May I have more?”
Tante went off into a scold entirely in French.
“You may be excused,” Rye said, untucking the table napkin from beneath Nettie’s chin. “I want to hear an English poem from memory the next time I visit, Nettie.”
Nettie scrambled out of her chair. “I will find something from Mr. Wordsworth. He likes France.”
Nowhere near as much now as he had earlier in his career. The Terror and ensuing wars had cost France many of her English admirers.
“You choose the poem,” Rye said, “and it must be English.”
She made a face and trotted off without sparing him a curtsey.
“There is time to make her into the perfect English schoolgirl, Orion. Have another slice of tart.”